In The Valley Of The Sixt; A Summer Home Among The Alps; Together With Some Excursions Among The Great Glaciers
The Eagle's Nest In The Valley Of The Sixt; A Summer Home Among The Alps; Together With Some Excursions Among The Great Glaciers
Longman, 1860.
First edition. 8vo. Publisher's original blue cloth with elaborate gilt decoration. Brick red endpapers with printed publisher's adverts. Further Longman's adverts bound to rear, dated September 1859. Lithographic frontispiece and eleven further tinted lithographs, after drawings by the author's wife, Lucy Wills. A very good copy, with a little rubbing to the edges and some tape marks to the endpapers. Contemporary ownership inscription to frontispiece recto.
Alfred Wills was the third president of The Alpine Club whose 1854 ascent of the Wetterhorn, and 1856 book on the ascent, heralded a golden age of alpinism in Britain.
This account is of the construction of "The Eagle's Nest", the chalet in Sixt, in the Haute-Savoie, designed by his wife Lucy. The book was therefore a joint production, with illustrations after drawings she executed, and also includes detailed accounts of Alpine climbs and walking itineraries. Tragically, she died suddenly of a heart condition during the book's preparation, and the work is posthumously dedicated to her with a tender eulogy.
Wills returned to The Eagle's Nest every summer for the next forty years, and it would become a hub for introducing family and friends to climbing. The most notable beneficiary of this was his grandson Edward Felix Norton, who was introduced to climbing at The Eagle's Nest and would later lead the 1924 Everest expedition.
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